Dune: Awakening is a hit, but it’s not without flaws. PvP in the deep desert is a particular issue for an awful lot of players, based on Reddit complaints, and you better believe that questions about Funcom’s plans for it came up during an AMA held today on Reddit.
There’s little in the way of concrete information at this point, I’m sorry to say, as Funcom is still figuring out exactly how it wants to proceed. But senior game director Viljar Sommerbakk laid out three overarching goals for PvP combat in the deep desert:
- We want players to make meaningful decisions about what they bring with them and how they outfit their vehicles
- Once players have engaged in PvP, we want the experience to be reliable, responsive, and clearly understood. This determines how PvP as a whole feels and how players make their moment to moment decisions in a fight
- To ensure a more reliable experience in ground combat, we are continuing to address issues with movement desyncs and rubber banding, as well as ability activation reliability
One thing Funcom is not considering, according to creative director Joel Bylos, is deep desert zones restricted to ground combat. Developers recently patched out the ability of ornithopters to “goomba stomp” players on the ground (although in kind of a half-assed way) but even without that goofy exploit, air power still dominates: As PC Gamer’s own Lisan al Gaib Chris Livingston recently wrote about Dune: Awakening’s PvP combat, “In most fights it’s just pilots trading missiles with each other in the air instead of engaging on the surface with swords, shields, and skills.”
Establishing ornithopter-free zones “is not the plan,” Bylos said. “However, a lot of our adjustments and balancing are going to drive combat towards the core vision, which is people competing over points of interest in the Deep Desert. The current balance between vehicles and on-foot is not tuned to our liking and there are multiple changes in the pipeline to address this (above and beyond bugs we will fix).”
Funcom also isn’t planning to remove rocket launchers from scout ornithopters, the source of another common PvP complaint. Instead, it’s working on changes that will see a scout ornithopter’s speed and maneuverability impacted by its loadout: Specifics weren’t provided but presumably you’ll be able to either come heavy or go fast, but not both.
That, Sommerbakk said, will make the assault ornithopter a better choice when you specifically want to engage in combat, but still leave some offensive capability available to the scout for those who want it.
Bylos acknowledged that he was “not being very concrete” in his answers, but said that’s because the team is still “planning and watching how people are playing and finding the right points to address.”
One thing that is on the way, though—not related to PvP but that I find interesting just because it’s Dune—is “sandwalking,” the Fremen ability to walk the surface of Arrakis without attracting the attention of sandworms. Bylos told PC Gamer in 2024 that Dune: Awakening actually had sandwalking at one point but it was cut, because “it looked ridiculous, and it made you walk really slowly.”
But Funcom has apparently figured out a way to make it not suck: In response to a player who said they wanted to be a proper “desert wanderer,” Sommerbakk said, “We will do walking without rhythm.”
As for Funcom’s more immediate plans, executive producer Scott Junior said the studio is currently testing a patch with “a lot of QoL updates” that it hopes to have ready for early July. “When we get closer to it being publicly testable we will release the full patch notes,” Junior said. “It contains too many changes for me to list here, but you’ll be seeing it soon!”
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